🚀 go-pugleaf

>>In article <71384@apple.Apple.COM> opstad@Apple.COM (David Opstad) writes:
>>
>>As I've said before, Unicode and ligatures are completely orthogonal issues.
>>I have on my machine right now a Unicode font containing almost 1,000 
>>glyphs, including scores of ligatures. The ligatures, like the rest of the
>>typographic richness of this font, are accessed via a well-defined method
>>that has *nothing* to do with the character encoding (i.e. Unicode).

I believe this is right on the money!

> In article <1992Aug20.013444.6313@adobe.com> mmwang@adobe.com (Michael 
> Wang) writes:
>
>In the case of document portability, I don't feel that Unicode and
>ligatures are unrelated issues. 

Well, we weren't talking about this kind of document portability before.
Unicode only pretends to provide portability of *plain text* across 
platforms.  Think of it as having the advantages and limitations of plain
ASCII text.  Formatting and ligature substitution systems like Line Layout
Manager are (as far as I understand) platform-specific, but can support
multiple encoding schemes. The PostScript language can describe formatted
documents in *final form* across platforms.

I think what you want, Michael, is a way to have *revisable* source form
documents, which are editable, portable across platforms, richly formatted
with ligatures and layout, yet have the same appearance across platforms.
I'd love to have that too, but I don't know of any way to achieve this yet. 

By the way, I'd like to give Berthold a cheer for starting this thread.
I symphathise with his frustration too.

> [Michael Wang continues:]
> How do you setup Unicode so that it can uniquely encode each of these
> different versions? Do you turn Unicode into a 24-bit encoding where
> each of the regular 16-bit characters can have 256 variations?

Perish the thought!  Unicode should stay the way it is.  If you want
consistent glyphs across platforms then use functionally identical
formatting systems, and a richly formatted source format, on all platforms.

My two cents worth,
	--Jim DeLaHunt, Developer Support, Adobe Systems Incorporated	
delahunt@adobe.com	...!{apple,decwrl}!adobe!delahunt      +1-415-962-3790
My own daydreams, not Adobe's daydreams.